RWBY Tuesday #4: Volume 9

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Blogger Who Fell Through The World,

a.k.a. Gatherer Of Moss

For those of you who have been wondering for the past few weeks, the "Gatherer Of Moss" part of these RWBY Tuesday posts is a reference to an old, "I Believe" joke from Blue Collar TV, a short-lived sketch comedy spinoff of the trilogy of Blue Collar Comedy Tour films starring the host of Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?, the husband from The Bill Engvall Show (what was his name again?), the tow truck from Cars, and Ron White. Blue Collar TV was kind of like a redneck conservative take on In Living Color or Mad TV, and it lasted just about as long as it needed to before the gimmick well ran dry and times a-changed. Many of the "I Believe" jokes can now be seen as sexist, racist, chauvinistic, ablist, or (for admittedly ironic effect) "encouraging" violent or otherwise deviant behavior, but that one joke ("I Believe...that the Rolling Stones have gathered a little moss") has stayed with me over the years for no other reason than my brain remembers useless bullshit if the wording is clever enough. So, "Ruby Tuesday" is a Rolling Stones song, RWBY Tuesday is the title of this limited series, and I am pushing forty with more than a few big mistakes and personally challenging experiences to my name because, metaphorically speaking, I don't roll that much.

For some meta-analysis of my thoughts on a true story where someone else gathered their share of moss, check out NPO #9: Farewell to Manzanar.

Also, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave some Semblance of a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you Scroll, follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you make eye contact with, and to summon that rocket-powered gym locker full of the latest Relics of news, Knowledge, and Creation on my content.

As for the other part of this post's a.k.a., it is a reference to an in-universe fairy tale that Ruby and Yang mention prior to the big, multifaceted, multi-episode finale of RWBY Volume Eight.

They talk about "The Girl Who Fell Through The World" being rescued by a knight, changing the world for the worse, and not being the same girl she was when she came out the other side.

At the time, I believed this to be another version of Salem's origin (she was rescued from the Tower by Ozma--making her a bit of a Rapunzel reference as well as the Wicked Witch--and when the Brother Of Light cursed her with immortality, the accompanying visual was like she was falling through the world; furthermore, Salem turned humanity against the Brothers after this, leading to its Destruction, and when she once again fell--this time, into the Destruction Pool--she emerged as something completely different).

But then the Volume Eight finale hit, and we got not one, but at least four girls (and one dude) falling through the world when Cinder and Neo attacked the Gateway Space and sent Team RWBY into the void that the Spirit Of Creation warned them about ("A final warning about that Space: Don't. Fall."). Because the series was probably trying to capitalize on Infinity War and Endgame hype at the time, the Volume Eight finale brought back that Volume Three, "no one is safe" feeling, but even more intensely because now, the main characters were expendable...until the post-credits scene (and months later, the Volume Nine trailer).

When Volume Nine kicks off, we get a frantic POV sequence of Ruby reliving the end of the Volume Eight finale, reminding us that Neopolitan fell with her.

When she awakens, Ruby is in the jungle by the beach from the previous post-credits scene, her scythe is missing, the scenery loops, cheese is a root vegetable, and her only hope of making progress is a talking mouse whose running gag is that he enthusiastically offers to help even though he has no idea where he's going...and then falls asleep. Also, there's this weird, sensible nonsense logic puzzle dialogue that keeps coming up about conflating one's name, title, and purpose ("What are you?", "How does one 'Little'?", "That's a lot of things to be," etc.).

Soon (and somehow), Ruby and Little the Mouse find Weiss, Blake, and Yang, and defend the rest of Little's tribe (who captured Weiss and Blake because cat ears and mice) from a Jabberwalker (a new, intelligent Grimm-alike monster that is so far exclusive to this Volume) that Yang was chasing. So, yeah; talking mouse, sensible nonsense, and a Jabberwalker. "The Girl Who Fell Through The World" is the RWBY-Verse version of Alice In Wonderland, complete with flat-looking soldiers, a volatile red monarch who likes games and beheadings, a (sometimes) purple cat with invisibility, self-division, and healing factor powers, a caterpillar who works with drugs, and a miscolored knight who rides a giant, white jackalope and has time management issues.

After the previous Volumes being twelve to fourteen episodes in length (not including character trailers or "World Of Remnant" supplements), and Volume Eight alone being so thick with plot, emotion, and stakes, this ninth Volume (which is unaccompanied by supplemental materials, has a very linear story, and only clocks in at ten episodes) feels extremely thin, light on action, and kind of rushed.

In the course of a single episode, Team RWBY find each other almost immediately, learn where they are (the Ever After, which we find out later, is the source dimension of the Brothers and all concepts of life and Creation in RWBY, giving a heirarchical explanation for the "why doesn't the use of the Staff Of Creation wipe out everything?" question that I had last time and sort of explains how the Vaults and the Gateway Space work), and fight a Jabberwalker.

At an auction that runs on a very Made In Abyss interpretation of currency, Ruby wins an object that turns out to be one of Penny's solidified Aura swords (I forgot to mention this last time because I was working on crunch and Volume Eight is so dense, but when Penny gets her human body, she loses her marionette blades, which throws her off when she's fighting Cinder in the Gateway Space, but she manages to conjure Aura construct replacements, and I thought this was a cool detail both times that I watched Volume Eight, but that cool factor was forgotten by the time Penny died again moments later because Volume Eight is amazing and sucks all at the same time) and Yang gets her prosthetic arm back.

The Team's goal this Volume is to get from the beach to The Tree, where the story from their childhood says a girl from Remnant named Alyx was able to return home, and that to get there, they must follow the story's events without changing anything (sort of making this Volume a time travel narrative). But this proves to be harder than expected because Alyx's prior visit to the Ever After already changed things, such as turning the Red King into a paranoid, petulant, cheating, homicidal, shrieking he-hag of a prince. Thankfully (or something), the group are rescued from the Rule 63 Queen Of Hearts by the Curious Cat (the Cheshire Cat of the series), who is supposed to be another gatekeeper/guide character to get the group to The Tree, but has a hunger for knowledge and bugs, teleportation powers, and a hyperbolic case of ADHD (or AD1080P, or AD4K, or whatever the highest visual fidelity of your time is that works as a pun here).

When they are again attacked by Jabberwalkers in a market (learning in the process that they are mostly constructs of Neo's Ever After-enhanced illusion powers, and that they can keep the "Aftrins" they kill from reincarnating like they normally would from their passage through The Tree), Team RWBY, Little, and the Cat are rescued by The Rusted Knight (who turns out to be an apocalyptically aged-up Jaune because Wonderland and time travel make sense).

Along the way, most of the team solidify their convictions about that whole, "who you are, what you are, what you do" existential mess, Jaune comes to terms with his imposter syndrome/hero complex baggage, and Blake and Yang finally and fully put their anime propriety romantic tension behind them. Then, there's Ruby, who has always been the plucky, optimistic leader, but has had it up to her haircut and beyond with all of this monster-fighting pressure in her Monday-to-Friday life, leading to a pretty brutal and emotional fight with Neo and illusions of all the people that they have both lost (Torchwick, Pyrrha, Ozpin, Lionheart) and could still lose (Ironwood, Nora, Ren, her Team, etc.) that ends with Neo convincing her to drink a cup of poisoned tea and "die."

In an obvious, but well-distracted-from twist, the Curious Cat is revealed to be the true villain of Volume Nine (huh; same number of lives as the proverbial cat...), and uses the powers he was made with (gathering knowledge and using it to send "broken" Aftrins to The Tree for repairs and reincarnation) to take over Neo, whose heart was rendered empty by the realized weight of her persisting grief and her anticlimactic victory over Ruby.

Apparently, Alyx had a brother named Lewis (named after Lewis Carroll, obviously), who was really the one to return to Remnant and publish "The Girl Who Fell Through The World," which took liberties with his actual experience and had a different ending to hide his sister's death. The Curious Cat had his own heart broken and his mind twisted when Alyx could not take him to Remnant with her, and so killed her while Lewis escaped.

In the end, Ruby turns out to still be alive inside The Tree, and rejoins her Team's prolonged fight with a Cat-possessed Neo (and then the Curious Cat himself) after learning the truth of the night her mother disappeared and finally coming to terms with herself, aided by a feminine, steampunk robot blacksmith that is possibly The Tree itself. Neo says goodbye to Fake Torchwick and Team RWBY before falling to her death and returning in the same wooden form that Ruby was in before, presumably where she will rediscover her roots--tree puns!--as Trivia Vanille and return as an ally in future Volumes. One last visit to the blacksmith, and Jaune lets go of the remnants (more puns!) of his guilt over Alyx's death--because pulling a clock-fruit off of a tree on the beach flung him back several decades to the events of "The Girl Who Fell Through The World" before everyone was born, and became the Rusted Knight who helped Alyx and Lewis on their journey before the Curious Cat turned evil and killed Alyx, but he still remembers the story and no one knew Lewis was the author of the book even though it's a bestselling children's title in Remnant and time travel in alternate fictional Wonderland makes total sense and no one else will complain about it at all--what was I writing about before the ranting started? 

Oh, right; the Tree blacksmith presents Jaune with Alyx's dagger (which might be Alyx herself because of how the whole, "reincarnate to better fulfill your purpose" mechanic works here?), and he gets his Atlas-era design and younger voice back. Back in the physical Tree, the Team are also greeted in the finale's last moments by a reincarnated Little, before passing through the doorway and returning to Remnant on the outskirts of Vacuo, where the sandstorm continues to rage and the kingdom is surrounded by the remains of the Atlas military.

There is no post-credits scene. Instead, we are treated to a trailer for the Justice League X RWBY: Super Heroes & Huntsmen movie, which was concurrently in production with Volume Nine, hence the shorter runtime and scaled-back action here. A tenth Volume has been fully scripted, but not yet greenlit for production.

What Volume Nine lacks in sense, substance, and action, it makes up for with emotional character writing and addressing sensitive subject matter like same-sex relationships, personal identity, the fury and emptiness of grief (which is something I can relate to much more as of this year), and even an episode on suicide that features a disclaimer warning (in the past, these have been used to indicate death-focused episodes and those with frantic fight sequences that could induce seizures). Though RWBY is clearly a fictional series with prominent fantasy elements, the handling of the latter could have been done more tactfully than, "don't worry; if you kill yourself, a steampunk blacksmith tree robot will help you reincarnate as someone better," but the finale offsets this questionable theming by having Ruby come to the realization that being someone else is not being yourself, and (barring any choices you make to harm, stagnate, or actually improve yourself) you are the best and only you that you can be, and being genuine to yourself requires commitment and resolve.

On a bit of another tangent, this is not the same as "be happy with your dirty, smelly, fat, skinny, ugly, and/or miserable self because being your actual best self takes too much work and is 'conformist' and it's somehow easier to defy Constitutional law and expect the rest of the world to be okay with you." That's bullshit, and I'm sick of it being such a thing that there are "inspirational" songs about it. If you are unhappy with yourself, don't end your life, don't embrace your self-hatred because that will not make you truly happy, don't be ironically reverse-conformist because unrealistic goals won't make you happy either, and don't attack or accuse people for "shaming" your choices because that causes the opposite of the acceptance and peace that you are looking for. Fucking work on yourself! Do some laundry; take a bath; shave; eat better, or eat more; do your hair so it frames your face better, wear a sexy pair of glasses or an outfit you feel confident in, wear more makeup, or less makeup; or get some exercise. Hell, I'm one to talk, but have you considered therapy? I hear that talking to people about your problems (and admitting you have problems) is good for your mental, emotional, and physical health.

Thomas Jefferson once said that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" for criminal action, and today, Sean Wilkinson says that laziness is no excuse for treating yourself like shit.

Don't treat yourself like shit and call it happiness, and while you're at it, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave some Semblance of a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you Scroll, follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you make eye contact with, and to summon that rocket-powered gym locker full of the latest Relics of news, Knowledge, and Creation on my content.

The Justice League X RWBY review is coming on Friday, so Stay Tuned and

Gatherer Of Moss,

Rolling Out.